The most unfortunate single shot in a movie this year comes in the opening minutes of
Jack Reacher.

A sniper, high up in a car park, is looking down at a city scene through a scope, with the
intent of taking out random people going about their business. The potential victims are seen
through the cross hairs — as the audience is invited to identify not with innocent people but with
the power of the assassin.

Then, for an endless second and a half, through the cross hairs, a young girl is shown.

The timing hurts
Jack Reacher because no one wants to see such an image, especially this week. Also
unfortunate, in general: The idea apparently constitutes family entertainment in America.The Motion
Picture Association of America rated the movie PG-13, just as it did
The Dark Knight Rises. Based on a Lee Child book,
Jack Reacher tells the story of a stern former military man who is hired to investigate
what at first suggests an open-and-shut case. Reacher, as devised by Child, is massively built, and
so Cruise is on the diminutive side.

Still, his will and his ability to convey single-mindedness in a character shouldn’t be
underestimated.

His acting is easily dismissed when not experienced in a while. Yet it automatically gives a
certain lift to a routine thriller.

A film with Tom Cruise, after all, never qualifies as garbage.

As an actor, he makes an audience believe that he could beat a man unconscious with the head of
another man — also unconscious.He seems just crazy enough to do such a thing. In another scene,
faced with the prospect of fighting five guys outside a bar, he is so unworried, so sure of how
this has to go, that you really wonder why the other fellows even bother.

Like every other action star, Reacher needs a formidable woman and a diabolical adversary. He
gets the former in Rosamund Pike, who plays a defense attorney, his employer. And he gets the
latter in Werner Herzog, the great director, who is slumming here. Herzog plays a villain in
keeping with his fascination for life’s extremes. In the film’s most memorable scene, he tells a
man that he will spare his life only if he will eat all the fingers of one hand.

By now, you’re getting the idea that this is an average action film made slightly better by
Cruise, more bizarre by Herzog and more watchable by Pike — but still in the “average” range.

Cruise, who turned 50 in July, looks amazing. He is in remarkable shape, although he would
probably do best to keep his shirt on (just something that happens at middle age, no matter how
good someone looks).